(FiveNation.com)- A group of Senate Republicans led by Texas Senator Ted Cruz has sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo demanding the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) quickly issue the permits necessary to restart production for existing offshore federal oil and gas leases.
In the letter, the GOP senators blasted the NMFS’s “permitting delays” which they described as a “de facto ban on new drilling” that has impeded domestic energy “investment, exploration, and production.”
These delays, the lawmakers argue, were caused in large part by mistakes the administration made in calculating the number of endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico. The senators added that because of these mistakes, the agency has “restricted access to safe, secure, and reliable” domestic energy production “through substantial, unnecessary, and arbitrary permitting delays.”
In an op-ed published in the Dallas Morning News two weeks ago, Senator Cruz blasted the Biden administration’s dishonest “Putin price-hike” narrative, noting that gas prices were rising long before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Cruz wrote that last year’s ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline which shut down 45 percent of the fuel supplies in the Eastern half of the country “should have been a wake-up call for Democrats.” He blasted “Northeast governors” for refusing to construct pipelines in their states to deliver fuel from neighboring states, and hammered President Biden for making it “exceedingly difficult” for the energy sector to return to pre-COVID production levels.
Senator Cruz must know that this isn’t incompetence. The roadblocks erected by this administration are all by design. And no amount of letters to cabinet secretaries will do a thing to stop them from crippling US energy production in the name of “transitioning” to “green energy.”
Last Thursday, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley hammered Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm over her claim that Biden’s anti-energy policies have had no effect on the skyrocketing price of gasoline.
Missourians are paying $4.10 a gallon for gas and @SecGranholm takes ZERO responsibility – and has zero plan pic.twitter.com/doBTAeDs3O
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) May 19, 2022
The Biden administration knows this is a lie. But the pain is the point.
